So, a friend or two has seen a thing or two about me.
Sometimes I'm contradictory, inflammatory, and arrogant.
It hurts. Once I noticed this when a third-order verbal spat led to my friend digging in and twisting my arm into realizing that she was right and that I had started it. (No, really, I'm pretty sure I started it and she is right.) Not an hour later I slammed on the brakes and stopped from being quite the same butte to a roommate.
Curious, no? Not the first time, and, sadly methinks, not the last.
By the way, an SAT study card once informed me that "ameliorative" means, as Webster's assures me, to improve or make better. (I actually ran into this root in Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series with the Meliorare society that worked to improve humanity through genetic engineering.) Isn't Latin great?
Now, you'll probably not notice that I haven't told half the story. I've seen 'ameliorative' used as a technical term, right next to pejorative, imperfect, subjunctive, and other language-related jargon. So, with a bit of Googling (which failed miserably from my wee Android device; try 'ameliorative euphemism'), here is what I learned:
1) She was right:
Amelioration (euphemism): making something sound better than it is
(This reference is actually quite cool and points out that the use of jargon has social implications that had been pointed out to me by a friend but that I rarely cognize. One of these implications involves this 'linguistic' amelioration.)
2) Understanding this usage is hard.
#2 is something I have run into previously as well. If I don't immediately understand it, no matter how marvelous or wondrous it is or may be, I suffer from the tendency to reject, spurn, trivialize, or analogize it out of significance. (For those of you pondering using this last path, it doesn't work.)
Hmm.
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